In the chapter, Zarathustra delivers a profound soliloquy directed toward the heavens just before dawn. He personifies the sky as a pure and deep “abyss of light,” expressing a profound reverence and a shuddering filled with divine desires as he contemplates its vastness and purity.
Zarathustra longs to ascend into the heights of the sky, seeking to immerse himself in its purity, which he equates with his own innocence. He speaks of hiding himself within the sky’s purity, viewing this act as a return to innocence. The concealment of God’s beauty parallels the sky concealing its stars; the silence of the heavens communicates wisdom to him without words. This silent exchange signifies a deep understanding between Zarathustra and the heavens, indicating a friendship that transcends verbal communication.
He acknowledges a shared history with the heavens, stating that they have been friends from the beginning, united in sorrow, dread, and fundamental truths. They smile their knowledge to one another without speaking. The heavens serve as the “light to his fire,” and together they have learned to rise above themselves, smiling down cloudlessly from a vast distance upon the constraints and burdens of the world below, where compulsion, purpose, and guilt steam like rain.
Throughout his solitary wanderings and ascents of mountains, Zarathustra has been in search of the heavens. His entire journey and mountain climbing were driven by a profound hunger and a necessary means to an end; his ultimate desire is to fly into the heavens themselves. He harbors animosity toward passing clouds, likening them to creeping predators that steal what is shared between him and the sky—the immense, boundless affirmation of “Yes” and “Amen.” These clouds symbolize intermediaries and amalgamators, the “half-and-halves” who have neither learned to bless wholeheartedly nor to curse deeply. He detests these doubting, hesitating clouds for tainting the pure sky and prefers even to sit in a barrel under a closed sky or in an abyss without a heaven rather than witness the pure sky blemished by them.
Zarathustra is tempted to pin down these clouds with jagged threads of lightning, to beat upon their potbellies like a drummer, fueled by anger because they rob him and the heavens of their shared affirmation. He expresses a preference for noise, thunder, and tempestuous curses over the quietude of hesitant doubt. Among humans, he similarly despises the soft-steppers, the “half-and-halves,” and the doubting, hesitating clouds.
He proclaims that those who cannot bless should learn to curse, a bright doctrine that has descended to him from the clear heavens—a guiding star that remains visible even in his darkest nights. Zarathustra has become one who blesses and says “Yes,” carrying this affirmative blessing into all abysses. To achieve this state, he struggled long, wrestling to free his hands for the act of blessing. His form of blessing involves standing above every thing as its own heaven, serving as its rounded roof, its azure bell, and eternal security. Blessed is the one who blesses in this manner.
He asserts that all things are baptized at the source of eternity and exist beyond good and evil; good and evil themselves are merely transient shadows, damp melancholies, and passing clouds. Zarathustra emphasizes that it is a form of blessing, not blasphemy, when he teaches that above all things stands the heaven of chance, innocence, accident, and exuberance. He has restored the ancient nobility of being born of chance to all things, liberating them from servitude to purposes and ends. This freedom and celestial serenity he has established over all things, like an azure bell, by teaching that no “eternal will” governs above them or through them.
He replaces the notion of an eternal rational will with exuberance and folly, teaching that “reasonableness” (Vernünftigkeit) is impossible in all things. A small measure of reason—a seed of wisdom—is scattered among the stars, mixed into all things for the sake of folly. He has discovered that while a little wisdom is possible, the blessed certainty he finds in all things is that they would rather dance upon the feet of chance.
Zarathustra exalts that the purity of the heavens lies in the absence of an eternal spider of reason and its webs; instead, the heavens are a dance floor for divine chances, a table for divine dice and dice players. Realizing he may have spoken the unspeakable or inadvertently blasphemed while intending to bless, he notices that the heavens blush. He questions whether it is the shared shame that causes the heavens to blush and wonders if he should depart and remain silent because the day is approaching.
Acknowledging the depth of the world—deeper than the day has ever understood—he concedes that not everything can be spoken before daylight. As the dawn arrives, Zarathustra prepares to part from the heavens, his companion in shame and ardor, recognizing that with the coming of the day, they must separate. He bids farewell to the heavens, his joy before sunrise, as the day breaks.